A1 · Numbers & Data · 10 minNumbers and dates in English, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for A1 learners. Hear a date and a total in context, meet the rule from a tutor, then practise across six interactive drills before a final six-question quiz. Every example comes from working life: invoices, deadlines, quantities and meeting dates. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelA1 · Beginner
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsNumbers, Listening, Writing, Speaking
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
Why English numbers look mirrored
Numbers and dates are among the first things you need in English and among the last that become automatic. The reason is habit rather than vocabulary: you have known the English number words for years, but your fingers and your mouth still follow the German rules. German writes 1.000 for a thousand and 1,5 for one point five. English does the opposite: 1,000 is a thousand, and 1.5 is said "one point five". Dates behave the same way. German writes "5. Juni" with a point after the numeral; English has no such ordinal point in writing, but it does use a spoken ordinal: "the fifth of June". One thing matters here: neither convention is wrong in itself. They are two conventions, and international standards state plainly that the decimal marker is a point or a comma depending on the language. It only becomes an error when you carry the German convention into an English document, because then your reader sees a different figure from the one you meant. This lesson drills that switch, using sentences that really do turn up in invoices, quotations and scheduling emails.
02 / 06
Dates: writing them, saying them, misreading them
A date has two written forms and one spoken rule. British English writes 5 June 2026; American English writes June 5, 2026. Spoken, both use an ordinal: "the fifth of June" in British English, "June fifth" in American English. The ordinal is not optional — "on the five June" sounds like a slip to a native ear, and "on fifth of June" without the small word "the" sounds unfinished in British English. The preposition is "on", because a single calendar day takes "on" in English; months and years take "in", as in "in June" and "in 2026". The genuinely dangerous form is the all-numeric one. If someone writes 06/05/2026, a German reader sees 6 May, because German uses DD.MM.YYYY. An American writer means 5 June, because the month comes first in the United States. Same string, two dates, one missed deadline. When a date must not be misread, write the month as a word, or use the international standard form 2026-06-05, which always means year, month, day.
03 / 06
Years: two pairs, one exception
A four-digit year is normally not said as a whole number in English. It is split into two two-digit chunks: 1998 is "nineteen ninety-eight", 1776 is "seventeen seventy-six", and 2026 is "twenty twenty-six". That is shorter than the full number and sounds completely unremarkable to an English ear. The years 2000 to 2009 are the exception. They carry a zero in the third position, which makes the pair reading awkward, so they are commonly said in full — "two thousand and five" in British English, "two thousand five" in American English. From 2010 the pair form returns: "twenty ten", "twenty twenty-eight". For working life this means contract terms, fiscal years and founding dates come in pairs. "The contract runs until twenty twenty-eight" is the ordinary form, not "until two thousand twenty-eight". The little "and" in "two thousand and five" is a British habit; British English uses it in hundreds too, as in "two hundred and forty". American English often drops it in both places. Either way you will be understood.
04 / 06
Big numbers and decimals
English is pleasantly regular when you say big figures aloud. The point is called "point" and introduces the decimals: 1.5 is "one point five", 3.75 is "three point seven five". After the point the digits are said one by one rather than grouped into a number — "three point seventy-five" would be unusual. The comma, by contrast, is not said at all; it is purely a reading aid that groups thousands, so 1,200 is "one thousand two hundred" and 45,000 is "forty-five thousand". Things get big with "million" and "billion", and both stay singular after a number: "two million euros", "three billion users" — never "two millions". This is where the expensive trap sits. German Milliarde is English billion, a thousand million. German Billion is English trillion. Rendering a budget line of 1,5 Milliarden as "1.5 trillion" moves the figure by a factor of a thousand, and nobody in the room notices straight away. When in doubt, do the arithmetic: billion = 1,000 million.
05 / 06
Common errors for German speakers
Five errors turn up in almost every A1 class, and all five are transfers from German. First, the decimal comma: "1,5 million" in an English email reads as a thousands figure, or simply confuses. Write 1.5 and say "one point five". Second, the thousands point: "1.000 euros" is read by an English reader as one point zero zero zero. Write 1,000. Third, the ordinal point in a date: "The deadline is the 5. June" does not exist in English; the correct forms are "the fifth of June" spoken and "5 June" written. Fourth, the wrong preposition: "in the fifth of June" instead of "on the fifth of June". Fifth, the Milliarde and billion false friend described above. On top of these sits a pure listening trap that has nothing to do with German: thirteen and thirty, fifteen and fifty sound alike. The -teen forms tend to carry stress on the second syllable and the -ty forms on the first, and the contrast is clearest when the number stands alone or is being contrasted. In fast speech that difference shrinks, so with quantities or prices it is worth having the figure confirmed once more.
06 / 06
At work: invoices, deadlines, meetings
In working life all of these patterns collide within a few lines. A typical English invoice line runs: "Invoice 4021, dated 5 June 2026, due on the fifth of July. Total: 12,400 euros for 1,200 units." That contains a written date, a spoken ordinal date, two thousands commas and a preposition. Three habits make you safe here. First, spell the month out whenever a date crosses a border — nobody can misread "5 June 2026", whereas 05/06/2026 genuinely can be. Second, say amounts slowly and in blocks: "twelve thousand four hundred euros" rather than a hurried run of digits. Third, confirm critical figures in conversation by restating them in other words, for example "so that is one point five million, correct?". Meetings follow the same logic as deadlines: "Our next meeting is on the twelfth of March at nine thirty." A day takes "on", a clock time takes "at". Reading out and spelling strings of digits such as phone or customer numbers one by one is a separate skill, covered in the sister lesson on spelling on the phone.